Festifools Parade!

The Festifools parade was last weekend here in A2 and my group and I took part with our gypsy fortune teller, Fromalda.

The parade was great fun, taking over two blocks of Main St. We had allot of fun giving kids their fortunes and generally playing around for one and half hours!

Warming up in the back alley.

My ADP II professor, Nick Tobier. We did these puppets for the parade as part of his class. Art school rocks.

Vinny did a hell of a job carrying that thing the whole time.

Team Can Opener

This little girl who was drumming the whole parade had a Dick Cheney mask on. She regaled us with her ability to do the splits, which was hilarious in that mask. I love Ann Arbor.

Thanks for reading!

Festifools Puppet!

So, my ADP class, I believe is the only one I've not posted about at all this semester because it is an "academic" class. Which means it's a lecture. It can thus be really quite boring. But Nick Tobier (the professor) won't let that happen to much! We are making puppets for the Festifools parade this weekend here in A2. Also, Nick keeps class interesting by doing crazy stuff like canceling the final! Super sweet.

Anyway, the puppet float. Our group (Team Can Opener we've christened ourselves, long story), is making a gypsy fortune teller who is going to hold a crystal ball in one hand and wave the other over the ball to make it see into the future! I know, super cool.
The puppets are made out of cardboard, lots of paper mache, fabric, and other odds and ends and are held up by bamboo sticks.
We started painting today.

The Hands with the base coat.

Long, bony fingers.

Luara (right) and Lucy (left) painting on the first greenish skin color coat. It wasn't working. We kept reminding ourselves that we could just paint over the last coat if it sucked. We repainted it twice.

Katie, our resident painter in the group, shows up and saves the day.

Applying the face.

The face as it is currently, with its not completed shaw hanging on it. We've got alot of work to do still on this thing before Sunday. Yikes.

Improv Everywhere

Everyone freezes on cue in Grand Central Station. Amazing.
I wish I could be a part of one of these flash mob things, I wonder if they have any in A2?

Hug + Blanket = Hugket

For CFC (context, form, concept) I've mapped a hug for our place mapping assignment. I wanted to get at the warmth, security, and enveloping love feeling you get from a good hug. I did this with a blanket (they don't call them security blankets for nothing).

The Hug Blanket

As I posted before, the whole idea was two separate people coming together. So I (rather literally) put two people on the blanket, their silhouettes that is. They are of course, myself and Kara (my fiancee). I hand sewed the cloth silhouettes onto the blanket, this took forever and I'll think twice about doing it again. But the final product was much more successful I believe because I took the time and the imperfections associated with hand crafted works. I chose the color red to represent love and passion. I mean, do you buy yellow roses for the woman you love or red?

When the person interacting with my hug blanket piece wraps themselves in the blanket they bring the two sides together thus bringing the two bodies together to form one body. I don't have pictures of people in it, my classmates took some pictures, hopefully I can get some from them to illustrate it being experienced.

I presented the piece today in class and had a critique, I think they for the most part liked it. I think I was successful in getting across my feelings for the place, what I found to be important about at hug. Maybe it was because other people picked places that were not supper important to them or places hard to define, but I feel that mine was one of the most successful.

Justin Finkmaster Flex (his nickname, I'm not even sure of his real last name, Finkleman I'm pretty sure), did a piece that I was really quite impressed with. The link on his name goes to his blog posting of his project. He did being scared out of your mind at a police station (being scared for being in trouble). It was really well done and I really felt uneasy and felt his anxiety and tunnel vision with the way he projected the animation and the sound. I just realized that it's actually me looking into the tube on the last picture. Sweet.

At any rate, A few more of my piece being put together.

Pinned down, waiting to be sewn.

Close up of the stitching (all done by hand).

Thanks for looking!

All Wrapped Up In Paper, Now What?

So, we have our latest assignment in CFC (content, form, and context...Michigan likes acronyms).

"The purpose of this assignment is to make a perceptual investigation of a physical space. Your task is to reveal aspects of this place that you find significant and to make a work as an expression of your experience of this. You will develop a strategy to subjectively remap a place as an 'experimental terrain' (i.e. you will experience, perceive, record, and map not only the physical aspects of the selected 'space' but also the mental aspects that make it a 'place' for you)....This project provides the opportunity to study the relationship that exists between the material and social fabrics that from our built environment."

So, when this was assigned I was stuck off the bat. I decided eventually to do a piece where my place was besides Kara, in a hug. A very safe, comforting, enveloping and loving place for me (she is my fiancee after all!). I kinda wanted to do a projection piece where pictures of us (extreme closeups) would be projected around the viewers and our voices murmur sweet nothings in the background.

This was my first sketch, the cube. People would stand around it.

I then evolved that into the surround version. The screens would surround the viewers.


I actually wrote in my notebook...
My prof, John Marshall, then kindly informed me that besides this idea not really getting at the enveloping good, safe feeling I was getting at, it was just creepy for anyone who was not me or Kara. He had a very good point.

So, back to the sketch book. John started me off with the idea of a blanket. I went absolutely nowhere from there and last Tuesday, he wrapped me up in a paper 'blanket' so that I could experiment. I'm laying there with paper above and below of me with a sharpie in hand and was instructed to "map myself". What? All I can see is an inch in front of my face. K...map myself. I'll trace my body! So I did, badly as well. It's hard to trace your own head when laying down.
So after I trace myself, I stand there drinking my coffee and decide to have a classmate trace me on the other side of the paper that was on top of me. After this is done it hits me. Ever seen those magazine adds or illustrations where you fold the two point A's together and the two point B's together along the dotted lines and something comes out of the image at the end? That is more or less what I'm going thinking. But with a blanket. You have two cloth cut outs sewn onto an open blanket. Fold the blanket together, close it, and you've got one body showing from the two halves of each body. When the blanket is open the hug has not happened, the bodies are separate. When the hug is happening, the blanket is closed, the two bodies have become one body.

A few pictures of the idea from my sketch book.


I'm really terrible at sketching people. Sorry.


I'm looking forward to figuring out the rest with Kara this weekend. I mean I really can't figure out a hug without being in a hug can I?

Thanks for reading.

Manifest Destiny: The American Dream

So, Laura and I finished our American dream poster this afternoon. We're both quite happy with it. When the whole project was assigned, I was a bit dubious about the assignment being on the American dream. As I said in a previous post, how hackneyed can you get? I had images of apple pie, immigrants and the statue of liberty.

Laura and I skewered that whole idea. Manifest Destiny baby. Spread by the bullet of course. I would say were commenting on the whole idea of American imperialism. Of course we don't call it that anymore, we call it "spreading democracy" or "protecting freedom", but it's a watered down version of colonialism. This time with 24 hour press coverage. And bombs. But the bullets have always been there.

The visual style of our piece was inspired by the British graffiti artist Banksy that I had talked about earlier. The piece below is what directly inspired me. It's in the solider.

So we took our idea on manifest destiny as the American dream and our Banksy inspiration and came up with this piece. The solider is shooting red, white, and blue bullets at a American flag world. Cause we want to own/command it (if that wasn't obvious).
We photoshoped it onto a wall because of our graffiti artist inspiration, both of us saw this as a graffitiesque subversive piece I think and putting it on a wall incorporated that idea for us. The text is read as off the wall because it is the title for the poster that this will be printed as (it prints with a white 1/2 inch border). Oh the whole poster size it 17"x11" printed. We did it mostly in Adobe Photoshop with some Illustrator as well.
It may not be a 'normal' poster, but I really like it and think it would be a good bit of fun to actually graffiti it somewhere in A2. We'll see if that ever happens.


Thanks for looking!

The American Dream

For TMP graphic design, all the sections are in some completion on the American dream. I have no idea if it is just school wide or larger, but these are a few of the ideas I came up with.

I was originally none to excited about this project, I mean, the American dream? That's so many different things to so many people and it's really been done before. Many many times before.
But I guess there is a reason it's been done so many times before. It's quite interesting what comes out of you when you start thinking about the American dream. Also, it's a group project which can be not so much fun (my partner is good for this project though, so that's good).

I started wanting to skewer the whole idea of the dream and landed on the idea of manifest destiny (the idea that the early U.S. had the right and the duty to govern from Atlantic to Pacific) and American Imperialism in the past few decades.

I also have started into how broken the dream is here at home. Specifically the level of poverty and homelessness in this country being so high is appalling. I wanted to comment on that for the last piece.

I'm not sure which one my partner and I will chose to work on further and submit, but I'll keep posting!






Thank you for looking!

Banksy

So at Mars Hill (church) this weekend, the pastor Rob Bell, who is the coolest, hipest pastor you'll likely meet (and not in that "Hey I'm like you kids! I like your music and have boy/girl problems to! Hey! Meet my buddy Jesus!" That's just lame.) Ok back on track here, he talked about the British graffiti artist Banksy. All the pictures in this post are of Banksy works.
I had heard the name before in class, but had never seen some of his work before. Rob showed us some of it, wow, really some really great stuff, some provocative some just funny. Talk about graphic design inspiration! I highly recommend you check out his site and some of his work, my favorite stuff is under the outside tab. Just click his name up there.

Some of my favorites of his work.

Idioteque

For TMP we are working on images inspired and derived from songs. We were assigned Radiohead's Idioteque from the Kid A album. It was later changed so that we could do any song we wanted after some people complained that they wanted to use their own crappy music, but I really like this song and have some good ideas, so I'm sticking with it.

A page of ideas for the Idioteque image from my sketchbook.

It's a great song, if you've never listened to Radiohead, I recommend them. This song is great (and the one after it, Morning Bell is great too!), I would check out their latest album, In Rainbows. It's really good.

I'm going to create a object using the letter forms of the lyrics for the song. Specifically a bomb. If you listen to the song it's pretty obvious why, but the lyric "Who's in a bunker, who's in a bunker, women and children first, and children first, and children" is what started my head going.

We'll see what I come up with.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also of note, my Drop A Gear, Drop The Hammer, I'm GONE print and the wedding invitation cover idea I made are currently being exhibited outside the Slusser Gallery here at Michigan A&D along with some of my classmates stuff. The images are right here(the wedding invitation) and here(Drop A Gear) as well as in previous posts.
So far I've had two things exhibited, my self-portrait from last semester's drawing course (I've got to go pick that up, it came off the wall to make room for my new stuff) and now this! How exciting!
Oh and it's spring break next week. Thank God. I need a break.

Art from Text

Our latest project in CFC was really interesting. We each found an image of some artwork from the 20th century with a emphasis on the human condition (what ever that means....) and we then described it with one page of words. We were supposed to be as vague as possible with our description, and just describe the feelings the work exuded with out saying what exactly is on the work. I found some painting of an execution. I was really vague with the description and pretty much told the girl who got mine that one party held absolute power over the other. She made a 12 foot tall spaceship/phallic symbol with a light box and picture of a womans face. It was the robotic-sexual revolution/sexual enslavement of the humans. I guess that's absolute power in a way. Anyway...

I got a description that told me all about what was there, but not the feelings exuded from it. I started to latch on to a part of the description that said that there was "a name" and a "month, day, year". I liked how anonymous this was and was pretty much the entire catalyst for my entire project. Also there was a description of what seemed to me to be bars like crossing the painting (it was a painting that was described, I forgot to say that) and how they pulled your eyes in a clockwise way around the painting.

I posted some pictures of my sketchbook below. The lower the pictures the later the sketch.

In the top sketch (my first) it's pretty much the literal sketch of what was described. No content, form, or context or anything like that yet.
The second sketch was the first with the arrows, my tongue in check way to lead the viewers eye around my piece. Setting up the basic building block of my project here.

In this series of half finished sketches, I started experimenting with maybe cutting the person up in squares. Picking squares was a happy accident. It's looking more like the building blocks of my project now, but concept and context are a very long way off. I know, I can't sketch people very well. You'll have to deal with my disability just like I do everyday.

This sketch where it really started to click. It is the basic overview of what the project would look like, each square represents a building block part with an individual and a famous person (more on that below) and the A Name and Month, Date, Year over the whole thing.

I had made an experimental image with Illustrator of cutting an anonymous person up into the blocks with another anonymous person, I used a picture I had with me of Kara and what I thought was a random picture of a man from Google images. I showed John Marshall the print and he sent me towards this sketch and all my concept and context because apparently the man I had found was Robert Mapplethorpe, a rather controversial artist. He had no idea who Kara was, but knew who this other guy was. It was the exact opposite for me.

It got me thinking about anonymity and the individual. Thinking about individuals got me thinking about how we are all individuals in our own way, but as we individualize ourselves from one group, we put ourselves into another group that has similar qualities.

Combining the two thoughts I started asking people (roommates, friends, fiancee) to name one famous individual that they could immediately recognize by their face. I only told them it was for a project on the individual I was doing. I got responses ranging from Bill Clinton to Justin Timberlake and to Malcom X. I then digitally put them and their celebrity of choice together in one of the template building blocks of A NAME, the arrows, and Month, Day, Year. I then arranged these around the edges of foam core board. Over the whole piece I added another layer of a larger A NAME, Month, Day, Year, and arrows. This covering layer was the group. Every individual was part of a individual group together on the board. All this thought happened over about 20 minutes. A week and half of sketching culminated in one happy accident and a hell of a

Below is the finished, presented work. Starting from the top middle and working clockwise, the famous individuals (you don't get to know who the anonymous individuals are, that would defeat the purpose!).

Justin Timberlake, Kate Winslet, Bill Clinton, Malcolm X, Einstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Angelina Jolie, and George Bush.

Probably the most important part for the viewer is the mirror in the middle. I cut out a template square cut blocks, arrows and the text and glued it over the mirror. I did this specifically to engage the viewer, they could literally see themselves in the piece. I did this because sometimes when I'm trying to understand a piece of work and I need to first take a leap of faith to understand the work and immerse myself into it, I have a hard time doing so.
I reversed the order of a viewer working their way through a piece and directly brought their face into the picture along with the other anonymous individuals. Your face would only be there for as long as you stood at the piece, and would be replaced by the next anonymous individual. I wanted to make it a bit easier for the viewer to "get it".

I presented it the work yesterday, I think it went over pretty well in my critique and I'm really happy with the work. I wish I had spent a bit more time professionally putting the physical piece together. Also, I should have made it bigger to make it less busy. Instead of 8.5" X 11" individual prints making up the image use 10" X 15" or something like that. Then the over all piece would be bigger and the black text and arrows would be a bit more spaced out. I also wish I had a bigger mirror to cover the entire middle (that one is from a hand held mirror that I had to take apart). But overall, I'm happy with the piece.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In an unrelated note, I wore my new vest today over a button up shirt. I'm feeling very confident in how I look right now. All secure in my fancy vest.

Gigantic Shirt!

I was in the Duderstat center (the media union) here at Michigan and I realized that there was a gigantic green shirt hanging from the ceiling. How cool is that? Luckily, I had my camera with me!

It even had a hanger!

Personal Font

For TMP graphic design we created our own personal font and then used it to create some sort of an image to compliment our fonts.
My font ended up being a sharp, angular type with inferred type just as important as what is there. I accompanied my font with a composition inspired by the band Mute Math. The text is from their song Stare At the Sun and reads,

"And we stare at the sun
but we never see anything there
Just a glare has become
all that we'll ever see there
And we stare at the sun"

The image it is overlain on is of the band. I created 4 different compositions of the text over the image with the image different in two of them and arranged them behind the main orange image with the words over it. I arranged them to fan out from the main orange square and to get at the hopeless repetitiveness of searching for meaning where there may be no meaning.


Thanks for looking!

Trash Pants, Trash Pants, What you gonna do?

I received some great comments from the Trash Pants Company and they were interested in the trash pants I made. They are totally different types of pants, you know, seeing as how their pants are actually made of of fabric not milk bottles. But anyways, they directed me to one of their youtube videos they had made as I might be interested. It's pretty funny.



Thanks for looking and thanks to Leigh at Trash Pants for your interest!

Free From and Structure

So in my big updating day (sorry it's been so long, i've been rather busy/lazy), I've got some graphic design work to show. This was for my TMP graphic design class. The whole assignment was about, again, figure ground work and a heavily contrasting interplay of colors and objects.

We used letter forms to create what was supposed to be a highly abstracted composition at the final print. I used the phrase "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" from Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. I picked the primary colors red, green, and blue. I really wanted the whole thing to blend together when looked at, your eye is not supposed to be able to find one area, color group, or letter form to really focus on. I really like my result.


I decided to try this technique on a possible wedding invitations or program cover for Kara and my wedding. The phrase is "Your my best friend and I love you." from a Weezer song. I tried to make this one a bit more legible, but it's still a bit illegible in places and if we use something like this, I'd clean it up a bit more. I was also thinking of redesigning it so that there is a large section of one color, like if I made the L in love wider, and putting there the specifics about the wedding, date, location and such.
I picked the colors based off our planned wedding colors, light navy blue, cream, and light yellow.

Thanks for looking!

The Presentation of the Trash Pants

So a few weeks ago , i presented my trash pants to my class. I had designed them to inhibit my movement so as to make me more aware of how much trash I created day to day so I had the class follow me on a walk. We went down the hall to the media center where they sell coffee and bagels among other foodstuffs and mediastuffs. I bought a bagel. Turned out to be a flavor I wasn't to fond of (cherry something). I bought the bagel because I wanted to do something that everyone could relate to on an everyday basis, buying a snack. I don't know if everyone in my class got it, but I heard a few "Oh, I get it".

I'm pretty happy with how the pants and their presentation came off, the assignment was to create an extension of your body and I'm not sure if I totally created a physical extension, but I believe that I was successful in creating an extension of your awareness of your body and what one person can create inadvertently.

Walking down the hall to the media center at the end of the hallway.


Buying my bagel.

Exhibiting the lack of range of motion. I couldn't sit down.

Thanks for looking!

Figure & Ground

Well,
I've finished up my latest graphic design projects for TMP II. We are dealing with figure ground relationships. The first was a personal statement piece. The second was a piece exploring repetition in figure ground relations.

I really quite enjoyed these projects and really love this class, it's my favorite of the semester by far. I'm thinking I may change my concentration to study graphic design. Graphic designers have such a hand in everything we visual interact with. From your toothpaste tube in the morning to the Coke can at lunch is visualy designed by a graphic designer. I like that immediacy of the work, it is everywhere. It may be viewed as art, or it may be viewed as marketing, but it fascinates me.

Anyways, these are the the two pieces. First is the personal statement. Click for the images for the larger versions.

I am extremely happy with how this image came out. Done in Adobe Photoshop and printed 8.5" by 11", it's a statement of my bike racing attitude. Or what I'd like it to be. It means to attack to win the race. In the race this picture is from, I actually did drop a gear and drop the hammer on my competitors. I was gone for a bit, but could not hold my gap and was brought back. I guess it should say after "i'm GONE", "I'll try it again when you catch me in a couple of miles". But that just doesn't hold the same ring and finality of "i'm GONE".
I really like how my body stands out so drastically from the back ground (black) and foreground (white) because of the vivid nature of the colors against such muted ground. My classmates suggested that this could easily be seen in a magazine add for a company like Gatorade. Wouldn't that be cool! They pretty much have fanned my graphic design flames for me. It's nice to feel talented.

The second image, shown here, is the repetition piece. I designed this piece thinking that it would go in a campus tour booklet for Michigan. The booklet would highlight special areas around campus like the Diag, The Union, the Lawquad, The Bell Tower, State Theater and so on. Each section wold have a title page of sorts with following information, maps and such about each location. I designed the title page of the Lawquad. Using a photo I had of one of the arched walkways in the Lawquad, I cropped it down and used several filters to achieve a photocopy look. The I accidentally dyed it purple somehow and liked it and stuck with it for the type. The arches are arranged to give many vanishing points in the grid of the photo.
I am very happy with this piece and am considering actually making the book that it would be part of for a personal study. It's an interesting concept for me and would look great in a portfolio.

Thanks for looking!